Monthly Archives: June 2016

Announced earlier this month, Google’s new tool allows you to test how fast and fluidly your website works across different platforms. The tool is very straightforward to use, and enables you to quickly assess, through various basic percentile scores, how successful and useable your website is on mobile versus desktop, and the different associated speeds. It may prove to be an invaluable new tactic for small businesses, as many consumers find slow and clunky mobile websites to be very off-putting, causing a definite loss of sales and therefore revenue.

What is it?

Essentially this is a very simple, well-designed tool, in keeping with Google’s style,that allows you to enter the URL of any given website, and test the performance across desktop and mobile, and the differing speeds. It does this through data collected from users, and various other methods of testing. The data is delivered back to you in a straightforward percentile manner, which allows for quick repeat testing with no real need for any kind of data analysis.

How does it help you?

So many businesses online today have poorly-performing, slow mobile websites. I’d suggest this is a move from Google to start making mobile browsing a lot more viable. The fact is, mobile browsing nowadays takes a lot of fairly constant attention and maintenance from the user. Things like having to flip the phone landscape and resizing text constantly, highlight a need for a more streamlined, enjoyable browsing experience. Once this is completely achieved, if it can be, desktops might have something to worry about.

As a small business, the ability to check how your websites are performing is such a useful resource. Undeniable figures and data that allow you to know where and what needs updating, and what potentially needs a bigger chunk of the budget allocating, for better optimisation. This could help you potentially beef up your online, mobile-based sales, through discovering, where you’ve been going wrong and losing potential customers.

Should you use it?

The fact is, right now, it’s free, and will be for the foreseeable future. There’s no reason not to be profligate with it, and use it to optimise your sites to your hearts content. So get testing your site, because in a lot of cases, improving loading speed will just be a case of optimising images and making other small changes, tweaks and improvements, and boosting mobile performance could have a positive impact on user experience, organic rankings and possibly sales/acquisitions too.